Lisa Kallai - January 28, 2008

Experience of Parents

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And how did your parents survive?

Well, they crossed...

Just they had false papers...

...they crossed...first of all they crossed into Hungary illegally and my father had an uncle there who helped and for a year they were just sort of hiding, going from place to place, but then Hungary wasn't so bad yet. It was...actually it wasn't so bad for Hungarian Jews, it was already bad for, for immigrants.

Yeah.

But uh, they did managed to hide. They had about thirty different lodgings during that year but uh, they went from one to the other and then they got false papers and got false papers...they got papers...my father got papers, papers for Polish officer or something and probably was that my father spoke Polish but he, he looked very Jewish. My mother didn't speak Polish so they were in, in, in a camp with Poles.

A work camp?

It wasn't actually a work camp; it was sort of just camp outside, outside Budapest. And the main thing was, you know, to keep up appearances, not, not...

Well the Eichmann commando got there March 1944...

Mm-hm.

...and that's when they started to send...

Yeah.

...Hungarian Jews off.

That was, that was bad, yes. But for non-Hung...Hungarian Jews it was befo...it was bad before that as well, so...

Do you think um, religion played a part in any of this? I mean...

On wha...on whose part?

Well, some people with whom I spoken have said they lost all of their faith after the war. Other people have said exactly the opposite; that they've, they've come back...

Mm-hm.

...or become more religious. Some people say they attend religious services regularly but they don't believe in it...

Mm-hm.

...they just go.

Well, I don't go and I don't believe in it.

Okay, so your family was pretty much uh, assimilated secular Jews?

Uh, my family was let's say, traditional. You know, they were Jewish but uh, Yom Kippur they went to the synagogue, they knew when Pesach was. It was more or less my mother's limitations. My father knew much more about Judaism. My father as a child had studied and he knew quite a lot about it, but he wasn't...

So what was the source of the...of your family's Jewish identity? Was it religion?

Uh, well, it was certainly not, not belief. It was more tradition I think and uh, and that's what my parents were and uh, I was always taught to say, to say if somebody said, "Jewess," to say "Yes, and I'm proud of it," and that was more or less the spirit of it.